There's bad communication and lots of resentment on BOTH sides of the phone line.

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Twelve years ago, while working at my very first real job right out of college, I created a website called The Chronicles of George in order to highlight the grammatically twisted help desk tickets produced by a coworker. I was a much younger and angrier person then, and the idea of putting up a website to ridicule someone else seemed hilarious and appropriate. Besides, it's not like anyone was really going to see the thing, right? It would be a dumb little lark I could share with my friends. That would be that.

More the fool, I. The CoG was noticed by a few USENET groups and within a month, I'd blown through traffic caps on two separate Web hosts. Local morning radio shows started calling. The site ended up as a Screen Savers "Site of the Nite" and a Yahoo Pick, and at its peak of popularity it did about 90,000 pageviews a day. Clearly, George's mangled help desk tickets and his characteristic verb tense—"havening," "receivening," and so on—had struck a collective Internet nerve.

However, the site is more than simply a bunch of screenshots and snarky commentary: there's a lesson to be learned in many of the malformed help desk tickets about the state of technical support. Problems run far deeper than just bad spelling.

A systemic problem

A few weeks ago, Ars asked what you think is wrong with technical support, and boy, did the responses ever roll in. The complaints came from both the folks who call into help desks and from the folks who work on those help desks. Responses were legion, though everyone seemed to be able to agree on an overarching point: whether you're calling for help or providing help, technical support is an awful thing that no one likes. There are shining points of light here and there where an individual has a fabulous, helpful support call. But as a whole, the comments were overwhelmingly negative about both the experience of receiving support and the experience of dispensing it. Whose fault is it, really?

Getting help from jerks

The complaint most often repeated by posters on the customer side involved the near-universal use of "scripts" by help desk techs. These guide the technician down a carefully prepared list of common frontline troubleshooting steps, but they also often enrage customers by forcing them to comply with instructions that often have little or nothing to do with the problem they've called in. ("No, rebooting my computer is not going to fix the toner sense error message flashing on my printer's screen!").

Enlarge/ Customers are often frustrated with being forced to plod through a support script.

Another common complaint was a perceived lack of knowledge and respect on the part of the technicians. There is a hard-to-shake pervasive cultural image of the bored and unskilled phone support person berating a customer for failing to follow ill-described directions. So posters vented no small amount of resentment about often knowing far more than the technician, but still being forced to comply with seemingly capricious basic troubleshooting before being escalated to a more skilled engineering resource (you know, the type with the ability to actually solve problems).

Enlarge/ Unskilled help desk technicians can make bad problems into absolutely nonsensical ones.

This leads to a third complaint: there is generally no way for a skilled customer who has already accomplished a lot of basic troubleshooting to skip the first-tier support people—the "help desk firewall," as one poster cleverly put it. You simply can't directly access the people with the knowledge to address more complex issues. The XKCD Shibboleet strip was mentioned more than once by way of example; such a key phrase would go far to eliminate a tremendous amount of angst-filled wasted time as the seemingly moronic first-level helpdesker plods through seemingly useless troubleshooting steps.

Enlarge/ Skilled users or those who know what they need usually have no way of bypassing the "help desk firewall."

Giving help to idiots

The feelings from the other side of the phone were just as vitriolic. An oft-repeated sentiment was that "all customers are liars." It's a cynical point of view, but much like Dr. Gregory House says, it seems to be true more often than not. The help desk workers overwhelmingly reported torrential abuse at the hands of customers who do anything and everything they possibly can to avoid giving correct information, and who seem to take a perverse pride in their ignorance about how computers function. The goal on the customers' parts is often to get their problem resolved as quickly as possible, without respect for process and sometimes without admitting they've missed basic steps.

Enlarge/ Some customers aren't above fabrication to get what they want.

Beyond that, help desk workers are frustrated to face sometimes frantic and enraged requests for assistance with basic tasks, which tie up time better spent on solving more complex problems. Passwords that were remembered on a Friday are forgotten like clockwork every Monday morning. A laptop won't boot because it isn't fully seated on a docking station. Excel is "broken" because scroll lock is on. When chided for not having even rudimentary computer knowledge in spite of a computer being an integral part of their job, annoyed users often fire back with the tired old saw: "You don't have to know how to fix a car in order to drive one." This is true, but although you don't need to be able to fix the car, you should at least know what the steering wheel does.

The biggest problem reported, though, was that customers simply can't be bothered to provide enough information to correctly diagnose a problem. Techs complained that getting an accurate picture of what might be wrong with a customer's machine is sometimes impossible; a call often starts with a customer saying "My computer's broke," and then responding to requests for more information with an angry "I don't know what's wrong—that's your job! Fix it!" It's hard not to feel frustration when confronted with enraged entitlement.

Enlarge/ The help you receive is only as good as the information you can provide.

Couples counseling

Much like an arguing couple who has been fighting for years, it's difficult for either side to see and acknowledge that the other's points have merit. Stepping back from the heat and looking at the laundry list of complaints, though, it's clear most of the things being complained about are symptoms, not actual causes. There are two things that both sides lack: empathy and trust.

This is easy to see—I should be a doctor! But much like a licensed professional counselor might tell a pair of folks they need to listen to and trust each other more, it's difficult to actually do. Merely being more empathetic and trusting won't automatically fix everything. Unfortunately, there are significant outside factors dogging technical support as well.

Still, it's hard to ignore the basics. The lack of trust by itself is a high hurdle to overcome, and it results in most customers approaching a tech support call with the attitude of "What am I going to have to tell this unhelpful jerk in order to get my problem fixed?" Most corresponding techs answer the phone thinking something like, "What is this idiot liar going to try to pull over on me now?"

Worse, outsourcing—and more specifically off-shoring—is far and away the most damaging thing to happen to the customer/support relationship since its inception. Sadly, even the sagest of technical advice can be rendered useless when filtered through a strong enough accent. I'm as guilty of this as anyone else—when I call a support line and fight my way through the IVR menu only to eventually get a person who is clearly from Mumbai on the line, I feel an immediate sense of despair. My perception, based on a decade of terrible support experiences, is that I need to do everything I can to get past this person and get through to someone who actually can communicate effectively and fix my problem. Like most assumptions, this thinking will make an... well, you know the phrase.

Beyond trust, empathy is another killer. Customers rarely take into account that the seemingly bored and annoyed technician they're dealing with is paid based on the number of calls per hour he closes. Or that the ridiculous script is mandated by his company and deviation from it can skew his metrics, possibly even cost him his job. Conversely, it's difficult for pressured techs to realize the seemingly endless stream of "idiots" they have to assist are real people. The problem they're calling in with, trivial as it might seem to the tech, is of huge importance to the customer.

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Lee Hutchinson
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor at Ars and oversees gadget, automotive, IT, and gaming/culture content. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and human space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX. Emaillee.hutchinson@arstechnica.com